The Great Rebellion

Boycott Nintendo! Technocratic scum!

An upvote for this on Steam is a downvote for Nintendo.

Banned in Germany. Tells you everything you need to know !

If it's so far fetched and ridiculous, then why bother trying to block it on certain storefronts? hmmm?

W for PC. L for nintendo. Fun game. Support the devs. Bought some copies for friends, it is that fun.

If it's so far fetched and ridiculous, then why bother trying to block it on certain storefronts? hmmm?

This is one hell of a fun game, and I love the political references in it, as well. Not far from the truth. Regardless of the content and messaging... (lol)... this game is downright very fun to play. Good controls, great pixel art, excellent music and sound effects. The progression system feels pretty balanced, where you can shave off some difficulty by buying permanent upgrades to make your subsequent runs just a little easier then to have it rebalanced back out when you push farther into harder levels. This design is what makes this very replay-able, because after all, you don't want to let the game win, do you? No you don't! So, you keep coming back with more motivation. 10/10 can't recommend this game, enough. Also, ♥♥♥♥ nintendo.

[h1][b] TLDR: Average in all aspects except music. The focus point seems to be on the game world and plot over gameplay, but everything ends up being mediocre. [/b] [/h1] [h1]PROS: [/h1] ➕Music [h1]NEUTRALS: [/h1] 🔹Steeped in real life political drama [h1]CONS: [/h1] ➖Controls ➖Poor hub with merchant NPCs spread out everywhere ➖Can be difficult to see where crosshair is amidst chaos [h1] [b] Content (Game world/Narrative) – [4/10] [/b] [/h1] The game world consists of a hub that you return to between levels, and multiple stages of randomly-generated areas. The stages are all contain the same general layout of platforms and rooms with the only thing changing is backgrounds. There is not much interaction with the world aside from destructible items. I unfortunately found no secrets or anything cool, I found the narrative to be a bit mediocre. You play as a member of an underground resistance trying to save the country of “Europa” from an oppressive regime trying to control its citizens. There isn’t really any sort of plot events other than “Kill the next boss “. While there are some funny memes and references to things like Evil Dead, I didn’t find any NPCs or dialog to be memorable. [h1][b] Gameplay (Mechanics/Difficulty) – [5/10] [/b] [/h1] The mechanics I found were average at best. I was met with an immediate issue upon playing - controls. With KBM, the aiming is good, but the platforming and movement feels off. When I tried the controller, the platforming is better, but the aiming is poor and the controls are unable to be rebound. Having dodge as the trigger is just plain awful and led me to go back to KBM. Aside from the controls, it plays like a fairly traditional roguelite. You have persistent upgrades that carry over between deaths, but you lose everything else. You have a wide selection of weapons, passives, and companions to assist you. The companions are basically passive entities that sometimes have an activated effect. The difficulty is fairly hard until you get some upgrades. Once you get some health, armor, and enough items to form a defensive wall, you can quickly snowball your power into turning the game into easy mode. In my playtime, I beat the game once. After dying around 3-4 times, I had enough upgrades to carry me through. [h1] [b] Graphics (Quality/Technical) – [5/10] [/b] [/h1] Fairly standard 2D platformer with an optional retro aesthetic. I didn’t find anything really noteworthy here graphically. On the technical side, the game ran fine and I encountered no bugs. i9-13900KF | RTX 4090 | 64GB RAM | 1440p @ 240hz | Windows 11 installed on SSD [h1] [b] Audio – [6/10] [/b] [/h1] Good music, I felt like this is probably the high point of the game. There are two forms of music - your basic music and the combat music. The basic music is some decent background music, like the rest of the game its just mid, but once you get into combat the music adds some additional layers that easily gets the blood pumping. Again, nothing significant here, but I felt the music was by far the standout part of the game. There isn’t much voice acting, just small parts said by bosses. [h1] [b] Replay Factor (Longevity) – [4/10] [/b] [/h1] It’s a roguelite, so there is some good replay value here, however, I felt the way the game presented its mechanics leave a lot to be desired. There are much better roguelites out there from a mechanical perspective that will last you much longer than this game (Dead Cells comes to mind). [h1] [b] Final Verdict – [5/10] [/b] [/h1] The Great Rebellion (TGR) is a roguelite that relies on its tone, messaging, and plot instead of gameplay, to provide an experience and considering how the roguelite genre is, none of that generally matters if the gameplay isn’t good. And to be fair here, I wouldn’t necessarily say the gameplay is [i]bad[/i], more that its just the shining example of mediocrity. There is nothing, aside from the music, that stands out to me with TGR. The guns/weapons, the skills/passives, the progression, are all “Typical roguelike experience 101”, and again while this isn’t terrible, its the same thing I’ve done before while having these systems implemented better. Lastly, I also want to address the elephant in the room: the political drama aspect and claims of white supremacy/anti-DEI. This is one of those games that I bought where I didn’t know there was a controversy surrounding it at the time (Looking at you, Heartbound). After playing and beating the game, yes, TGR has some obvious and intentional design decisions that promote the devs point of view. Do I agree with it? No. Is it offensive? Maybe. Is this factored into my scored review? No. I am a believer of satire, and a meme-y game with a differing point of view is simply someone I don’t agree with expressing their point of view that they have every right to. Overall, I do not recommend TGR. I consider it to be an average roguelite at best and then with the additional layer of drama surrounding it, it's not something I would recommend to others. If you want any example of a roguelite that I do recommend, and is actually very similar, yet superior mechanically, to TGR, check out my review on [url=https://steamcommunity.com/id/Synikx/recommended/588650?snr=1_5_9__402]Dead Cells[/url]. Can’t wait to see how many jesters a negative review will get me. Give me points, snowflakes :P [h1] [b] Recommend? (Price) [Y/N] [/b] [/h1] [h1] [/h1] $16 is a decent price, but it did take me about 5 hours to beat the game once. I would recommend waiting on a sale if interested. You can find my curator page here: https://steamcommunity.com/groups/Synik_GR

The game is good, but not great as the overwhelmingly positive reviews suggest. In terms of gameplay and technical quality, it is lacking some important QoL improvements. As with every other politically themed game, the positive reviews mostly seem to come from approving the political message and praising the devs as a martyr for having their game banned in Germany and on Nintendo Switch (which for the record I do not approve of). It seems like that, because most of those reviews have under 2 hours of playtime, at which point you should barely have unlocked just a third of the meta-progression upgrades and have seen most of the game only if you have played it at a lowered difficulty. Having played through to the end, I kinda get the problematic nature of the game, because it seems deliberately made to stir some drama by confronting you with its theme and having you interact with it in some way, rather than just making the theme stay on the background and keeping the interactions just optional. Even the visual style of the game seem to have been aimed towards an added shock value, all from the enemy character sprites to the aggressive neon colors used for the backgrounds. As an example of what I mean, whenever there are NPC characters in the main game hub that can provide some in-game bonuses for the currency of negative social score, you first have to click through several boxes of political commentary/satire before they present you with a choice of buying their bonus or not. If you just quickly click through those, you may easily pick the option you do not want. In other such games like Hades, there is a separate button for the dialog with lore and the in-game benefit, so you can just skip it entirely, but here you cannot. In another instance, you get presented with some highly charged statements attributed to the "woke" culture (such as whether there were black people in certain historical settings or not, or just plainly that being white is bad) and in order to progress within the game, you must state whether you agree with them or not, while the latter case labels your response as AI fact-checked disinformation and allows you to progress with the fight. It is as if you find some clickbait post on Twitter and instead of just reading it and continuing to the rest of the internet, you first have to be an active participant in it, must respond in a specific pre-determined way, and only then you can go on. I hope we can agree that it is not really cool to present political themes this way. I guess the bottom line is that while many of the people would play this game and excitedly call it BASED, I call BAIT and consider the controversy around it as nothing but a clever marketing tactic, which with the amount of positive reviews it got worked for the devs quite well. So I suggest you think twice about getting offended by how the game ended banned and maybe for a while consider that you might be being used.

this game is fun and i suck at this game